The word Chemical is one that means slightly different things to different people.
To many people, a chemical is something that is toxic and harmful to the
environment – for this reason, many products which you can buy these days
claim to be chemical free. However, these are only one sort of chemical.
A chemical is just anything made of atoms, and this means that all ‘stuff’ is
made of chemicals – your food, your clothes, your house, even you.

Chemists, scientists who study chemicals and chemical reactions, get their
chemicals from various places. Elements are the most basic types of chemicals,
ones composed of a single type of atom, and some of these, like carbon, gold
and sulphur, can be found in nature. Some chemical compounds, which have
more than one type of atom joined together, can also be found in nature – water
(H2O) would be an example.

But many other important and useful chemicals cannot be found naturally and
so these are made in laboratories using chemical reactions. Chemists sometimes
make these themselves, and sometimes they buy them from chemical companies.
One American company, called Aldrich, has a catalogue of chemicals that you
can buy, which is 3000 pages long!

Many of these chemicals, especially the ones that are used to make things like
plastics, are made from simpler compounds which are originally obtained from
crude oil. As oil becomes harder to find, and so more expensive, chemists are
beginning to look for other places to get these simple compounds from. One
possible place is called biomass, which is things like corn cobs, which we
normally just throw away but have lots of potentially useful chemical compounds
in them. If chemists can work out how to get these compounds out of the corn
cobs then we will be less likely to run out of them, since we can always grow more corn!